Oral histories

But it is quite interesting that within the Faith to Faithless community in general, there are a lot of LGBT+ people. And I think one of the reasons is because we don’t fit what we’ve grown up with. Like, it doesn’t matter how hard we try. If you’re queer in any way, you’re not going to fit that very square heteronormative box. So you always feel wrong. That really helps you get to a point where you start to wake up from the indoctrination. I think it’s that emotional disconnect that really makes a difference. So statistically, there are a lot of LGBT+ people within Faith to Faithless.

When we moved down to Dorset, the local humanist group is a very big group. And they always had a stall for Pride. And what happened the two years that I was there, they didn’t want to go into the Pride itself, the Pride arena, because that was paid for. They wanted to set up in the town square, where you would have a lot more footfall. And not just people who wanted to go to Pride, but people in general because it was a humanist stand. And then I would do the Faith to Faithless bit. So I would be there as a humanist, but also, you know, as Faith to Faithless. And that, that was really good. We had lots of people talking to us. And we had the religious bigots shouting at us – it was great fun.

But of course, over time, the attitude towards our leafleting has changed greatly. And I did go on, well I started going on marches soon after I got involved with gay things in Bath in the Bath Gay Awareness group in ‘72. And I went on the march in ‘73, which was only the second one. And at that time, it was much smaller. And you had police all the way along both sides. And you did have people, both National Front types and religious extremists, sort of abusing you and shouting at you. Whereas in the last 10 years, you go down Regent Street etc. And there are masses of crowds cheering and wanting to take all your leaflets. Yeah, it’s got a lot more relaxed…

But I do remember, having only just started doing gay things in ‘72/’73, when I went to these meetings, in Bath, when I was working in the early ‘70s, if I got a copy at the meeting of the Gay Awareness Group of Gay News, I would stuff it deeply in my pocket on the way home. I’d be very concerned, not that anybody would start diving into my pockets, but I would be very concerned that anyone would actually know what I was carrying. It’s remarkable how nervous and anxious I was then at that time…

Of course, one of the things about the Gay Humanist Group, you may have heard the story already, is that we called ourselves the Children of Mary in the early days, because in 1978 [1976], Gay News, Denis Lemon, had published this poem by a guy who was living in Japan, which was really a Centurion’s fantasy about the body of Jesus in the tomb. This caused ripples. Mary Whitehouse took Denis Lemon to court. Apparently, while the court case was going on, she said there were all these awful organisations that were threatening the fabric of society – the gay this, the gay that and the other –  including the Gay Humanist Society. This was the year before the first meeting. And somebody said, well, that’s a good idea. So it was only, it was because of Mary Whitehouse mentioning this totally non-existent organisation that people actually thought maybe we should get one going.

Before we had civil partnerships, I did do affirmations for some years in this area. That was quite enjoyable. The ceremony was fairly straightforward, but people did seem to find it quite moving. And one of the good things about it was that very often people would attach to it, almost like a wedding, a sort of meal afterwards, and they’d have all the people from work and their family. So it was, it was bringing all the community together, and a number of people who might not have really thought about LGB things at all beforehand…

I don’t remember very much training. I remember we were sent a pro-forma with all the things that were going to be said and there was a Native American poem that was recommended, which I often used, which I’ve probably got a copy of upstairs somewhere still, and which people seem to really like and which really was about people blending and being one, and it seemed to be quite moving. So I did that for a number of years…

Some of them were humanists. Some of them just wanted the ceremony. They were mostly relatively young. I remember one young couple who were two women in Nottingham, they were on an estate north of Nottingham. I remember when I went around to them to do the rehearsal, they had the television on, and they didn’t turn these off while we did all the rehearsal. That’s the way some people prefer to be. And then I, yeah, it went well, it was enjoyable. But I met one of them in the gay pub in Nottingham about a year later. And she said, oh, no, we’re not together anymore, but it was great. So as long as they enjoyed it!

That’s a very important part of George. He was this lively, camp, mischievous, interesting man. And his partner – they were together forever. This is George and Roy together. Now Roy was completely the opposite. Extremely introvert. It was very hard to get more than two words out of him. You often see that with couples, you get an introvert and extrovert together. So George, life and soul of the party. Now the thing with George was, there was a bit of the Tantrums and Tiaras thing… a bit of this Elton John business going on. He had a vicious temper, he was very easy to upset. And he really needed to be the centre of attention. So he was a handful. But so courageous and energetic and effective in lots of ways. And very good, you know, always remembered everybody’s name, and he was great.

No, I didn’t. I wasn’t really involved. I mean, Steve and I were never interested in any sort of marriage or ceremony or anything like that. And I, I’m still a bit uncomfortable with using the word ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ to refer to a same sex partner, because I never thought that was what I wanted, really. Although Keith, we’re civil partners, but I never called him my husband. And I don’t know why, I’m perhaps just a bit old fashioned. There’s something in there that I don’t, I don’t feel comfortable with, because I was never trying to emulate a straight family. And that’s something else the gay movement has lost actually. It’s become very, very conventional. It’s gone very much down a sort of Stonewall route rather than an Outrage! route. You know, it’s become just like heterosexual life, and we need, you know, a monogamous, committed lifelong relationship. There’s no such thing as a lifelong relationship. So I wasn’t particularly interested in that. 

What I have found very good is humanist funerals, because I’m now at that age where I’ve been to more funerals and weddings in my life. And I organised humanist funerals for my mum and my dad, and a couple of really close friends. And they’ve been such good events, really meaningful and actually enjoyable. And I met a marvellous man through GALHA, Bobby Mill, he was an actor. He died about three, two or three years ago, in his 80s, well in his 80s. And he was a huge, tall, camp, public school educated, classic English homosexual, really. He had a marvellous barking laugh, and I’d always try to get him laughing in public places, because it was so hilarious. But he was, yeah, he was a wonderful chap. But his funeral was brilliant. And you should always go to actors’ funerals, because you get the most, best anecdotes. And because it was a humanist funeral, it was all about him and his life. It was fascinating, yeah, some great, great stories. But I’ve been to a few, particularly Catholic funerals, that are just dead for me. ‘Insert name of deceased person here’, you know, and then loads of claptrap, and I think they’re meaningful for some people. But for me, they’re totally alienating. I’ve also refused to be a godfather several times. Because I am just not prepared to lie. And I know a lot of people think that, it’s like me not joining scouts, isn’t it, it’s the same prissiness really. I don’t, I wish we had a, it’s kind of a remaining campaigning issue. We need a secular version of godparents, because it’s a nice idea when it works. It’s great.

I was 25 and there were people there that were in their eighties. Well, of course, if you were in your eighties in 2005, you know, you’ve been young in the days of extreme persecution in the mid-20th century, arrests and everything else. And there were so many people with those sorts of stories, people who’d been arrested, people who’d lived in fear, people whose partners had been chemically castrated by the state, you know, because that was the time that they lived in. And so, of course, that gives rise to a very close community feel because although, obviously, I hadn’t been, no-one I knew had been, chemically castrated, but that, those same things I’ve been talking about being true of my experience being young, that incongruence between how you think of yourself and how society thinks of you, that oppression of your identities and feelings, that state sanction of prejudice against you, those things formed a continuity of experience between us all, even across the generations. And I was very aware of that, as being a very mixed-age environment those connections that we all shared being sort of thrown into greater relief, as a result of, what was obviously the case of people being of different ages, that emphasised even more the common experiences that we had. So I think it was a very interesting moment to have joined because all of that was there, soon to be dissipated of course because those people died and those experiences didn’t come again, thankfully. Not yet anyway. And so, there was enough, and there were enough causes to keep people going, keep people galvanised because some things had not yet been achieved, but at the same time there was a sense of positive momentum and that society was changing. So I think all those ingredients altogether made for probably quite a good experience of GALHA as a group for me.

I think the work towards same sex marriage, I mean, and of course, here Humanists UK has played its part in, in partnership with GALHA and now LGBT Humanists, you know, not just the lobbying for changing the law to allow civil partnerships and then equal marriage but actually doing weddings for decades in the twentieth century before it was even [legal], I mean that so socially normalises the whole thing as well as being part of the political answer. And when, on the political side, when the government in the final reading of the same sex marriage act thanked the stakeholders who’d made it happen they thanked two organisations, Stonewall and Humanists UK, and they wouldn’t have, Humanists UK would not have been in that game, I think at least as deeply in that game as to be one of the two organisations thanked for, you know, their support with the act, if it hadn’t been for GALHA having existed and pressed these issues to the top of the agenda.

That was always the point of having an LGBT section, or indeed a Northern Irish section or an armed forces section. It is so that there’s a gathering place within a much bigger organisation for smaller voices to be heard. And I still think that’s right. And, having said that, whenever we went to the wider BHA conventions, quite often a hand would go up from a straight person, saying ‘why do we need an LGBT section? Why can’t we all just be together?’ Yeah. Which I think we had pretty good answers for, but that question was always there. That question was there right from the very start. You know, watching one of the interviews with Jim Herrick he mentions that and says that people would think that they understood LGBT rights, but then demonstrate utter ignorance about all of the things that we would think are obvious. And so that’s why you need an LGBT movement, you know.

And also just once a month – because for a lot of our older members, we were their one outing of the month – and just once a month to not be the minority in the room is important. You know, minority stress is a real thing. Yeah. And just to offer a space and a community as much as any, you know, regardless of all the campaigning and the fundraising, just being that space, I thought was very important.

We were quite involved in the campaign for equal marriage. I think that was… was it 2012 when the Equal Marriage bill was passed? 2013. It felt like we were doing important stuff, you know, and it felt like… Maybe we were! I mean, I don’t know if we personally made a  difference or not. Oh, we absolutely did. But it felt like we were in the thick of it. You know,  we were in the Houses of Parliament whilst the bill was being passed. Yeah, we were upstairs in the Houses of Parliament when the legislation was voted on. And one of our members, Chris Ward, who later briefly became chair, he and his partner created the Lobby a Lord app. Oh did they? Yeah. Which made it really easy for people to write to lords in the House of Lords to, well, obviously, lobby them to vote for equal marriage.

And GALHA friends and colleagues, Peter and David, were the first people to get gay married. Indeed. At Islington Town Hall, which we both attended at midnight on the day that the legislation came into effect. And then after the ceremony, I went with them in the limousine with Peter Tatchell to the, what was it, Manbar, which no longer exists, where they were serenaded by a drag queen. It was marvellous! 

We did a lot of protesting outside Parliament in the run-up to this and as the various votes were happening. And there would always be, um, religious people with big banners saying ‘pride is a sin’, and with megaphones. I remember being told that I’d stolen the rainbow from God and I would die of AIDS. Um, to be honest, personally, I mean it’s horrific and awful and shouldn’t happen, but it was quite entertaining to get a big rainbow flag and get a posed photo with someone with a banner saying ‘pride is a sin’ and stick that on Facebook. You know, use their power against them. I remember the ‘pink choir’ was there, or possibly the London Gay Men’s Chorus, and they were handing out lyric sheets. I can’t remember what the songs were, there was like ‘We’re going to the chapel, we’re gonna get married’ and all sorts of wedding songs and we, and there was a band. ‘Get your rosaries off our ovaries’.

I remember as well, actually, particularly positive memories around talks that we were able to give. One of the particular ones that stays with me was in June, I think it was June, of 2022, we had an ‘LGBT Humanists: a History’ YouTube talk that finally was broadcast after months and months of build up. And we were able to get Maddy Goodall to talk about the heritage of LGBT humanists, we got Andrew Copson as Chief Exec. who also spoke about his time with LGBTQ Humanists, then we had me as well, and we had something like 200 people just on this zoom call on a random weekday evening. Well, that’s how it felt, it was very humbling.

And I remember that that was a moment where, you know, having had the lethargy, I guess, and the unpredictability of COVID, we did see people really, really quite keen and kind of gagging for that broader conversation, and from there we had the really successful history event, and then started to launch our work on supporting LGBT+ people in care settings, particularly elders in care settings, as well as continuing that pressure on government policy around conversion therapy, and starting to widen that to LGBT non-religious asylum seekers. So we saw change, and positive change, on all of those things.

I actually was privileged enough to speak at both. And I was involved very closely with the planning, and delivery of both. And one was online, whereas one was in person. So that also made an interesting, contrasting set of planning and delivery pressures and expectations.

I think the one in person stays with me for a couple of reasons. I mean, first, the venue, Fitzrovia Chapel, is just beautiful. And it’s incredible to see with candles lit up, and this beautiful old chapel, a non-religious chapel. Which actually is then, as you say, really, really quite full with people who want to pay respects. And the other is that we were able to get speakers to read off the names of all of those trans people who had died. And I remember we also were able to get a speaker from another charity, a partner charity, who we’ve worked with quite a few times. And they were able to speak and it just felt like it was a voice of much needed, kind of, moral clarity, both their contribution and the event as a whole. This was at a time when we were seeing ever resurgent worries around violence towards LGBT+ people, particularly trans people. Organisations were very very loudly protesting rights and yet there we were in this beautiful kind of, quasi-sacred, but very humanistically sacred space with just the candles and the silence. The smells of a little bit of incense, of people buzzing at the end to talk to each other, and to look at the photos of lots of the people who had died. And as you say, I mean it was incredibly, emotionally powerful. And something that although I knew about peripherally I had never fully, fully internalised, I suppose, until I came to organize such an event and then ever since it’s really woken me up to the scale and the tragedy of anti-trans violence.

I moved to South London in around 2000 or so, and I’d been through a second lovely long relationship. And I think I stopped going out, really, doing things like that. Until I then came, we’re good friends, but then I came here to live in Bloomsbury and discovered GALHA was still meeting at Conway Hall. And that was great. And some of the faces were familiar. And it’s just as effective, you know, pointed in what they’re aiming for: discussion, broader minds, support. And suddenly I think it started to age, the structure just naturally aged. And with lockdowns of the pandemic, four years ago, I think it kind of folded, and it had to be, yet again, another phoenix coming out of the ashes. And that led, because I think Humanists UK and others weren’t going to let it go, so that led to the LGBT Humanists group coming from it. It may have the same kind of terms of reference or what it’s aiming for, but it was a bit more inclusive, I think, a bit more broad, a broader approach. And then also, they’re very aware, because there’s so many students around this area with the colleges and universities, they needed to reach out to a younger audience too. So I think there’s the LGBT youth group, a younger group. So suddenly, I’m seeing some familiar faces going to Conway Hall, and a lot of new faces and younger faces. And that’s what it’s about isn’t it, that the group might age, the original people might age, or the group gets older, but it can change to bring in newer [people]. Because I think in London, I think it might be quite hard for young people to meet just somewhere easygoing, where it’s not all about drinking and staying up late. So I know there are groups through Meetup as well, but you have to seek them out. So isn’t it funny, things have gone in a circle, that social groups and meaningful groups, groups with a meaning, are just as important. And long may it run through Humanists UK.

Well, meeting the Equalities Officer, and then being given the names of prisoners coming into prison who might kind of benefit from seeing me as a gay bloke. That was great. But then I had to also be careful of the system and not be broadcasting things. So it’s pretty subtle. And I got to know one guy very well. ‘So, well, you live here’, kind of thing. This was when he was about to leave, so we had this nice, sort of rounding up. ‘What’s the best way of me giving support?’ Sadly, it just shows things as not as progressive. He said ‘well, it’s almost Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. Just do it subtly. Be there supportively, but not broadcasting’. Okay. Work in progress. But luckily, what I do has been accepted.

I’ve got a daydream of perhaps one day running a support group, a focused support group in the prison. Then well, that means some of the other guys on the wing would know where this person was going to. So that’s for the future, I think. I did for a while, I was a member of the prison PIP group. Prison in, support in prison? That’s where we… it was kind of a mentoring scheme for staff and other volunteers. Because, yeah, even though we’ve got equal opportunities policies, if you go into working in a prison environment, that can be tough, just from the other officers.

Yeah, we’re getting there, I think. And it’s still, it’s so, it’s still so needed, that we shouldn’t forget that there are structures and well meaning groups, run usually by volunteers, that still are a cornerstone for the LGBTQ community.

Some of the old men from the scientist side of the university were naturalists, pioneers in the humanist movement, they were sceptical to, erm, to promoting homosexuality, because they felt that it would bring rumours that would be harmful to the humanist movement. And as late as 15 years ago there was a meeting about this in the Pink Committee, and in the, er, meeting, where one of the sceptical ones said that, ‘You don’t need your own group because you are normal, like others are normal,’ and the leader of the committee then stood up and said, ‘No, we are not normal!’ So, that’s what my need to come together as a group was.

There’s an American in Stockholm, Bill Schiller. He, er, he’s an expert in arranging seminars and meetings on the cultural side of LGBT, like films, art, music, cabarets, etc. He found out about me and invited me to have a, er, to join in with his wedding with his man. Er, I did the speech and there was a, we’d say, a judicial person from the courts of, from the town, doing the actual marriage ceremony. That was the beginning of my contact with this Bill Schiller group, and he was particularly interested in Eastern Europe. So, I think I’ve been to… eight different countries with him, for seminars. Not so many people met up, but er, it was some experience. Erm, I dealt with the, er, humanist marriage for LGBT couples, and funerals, which was also important, of course, that gays and lesbians, that they get decent funeral ceremonies, er, when not always the families are helping.

I think obviously, first is for people to be proud within an organisation, among people who share similar principles and beliefs, and I think it’s about fighting about LGBTQ+ rights. There is a lot of, there’s a lot of, again, talking about these groups of religious, the religious groups, trying to change things, take away liberties, so I think the role of humanists, LGBTQ Humanists, is really important for protecting these and bringing awareness into society and to members and to people around in general.

It’s a, it’s a really important thing. I mean, that’s how I am aware of many campaigns. And, yeah, it’s really, it’s really important. And also sharing experiences with like-minded people, meeting new people, supporting each other when needed. And I know that there is, there are some services as well, for people who, gay people, who don’t want to have a religion anymore. So I think that’s a serious thing, being able to support someone when they need or when they’re going through a difficult phase in their lives. It’s such an amazing thing. When you lose your faith, or you become a humanist, or you don’t believe, you don’t have a god, you don’t believe in a god anymore, it can be a difficult time. So I think it’s an amazing thing to have some kind of support from people who have similar beliefs, but also who are gay themselves, so they can support you, they can give you good advice. It’s an amazing thing. So yeah, it’s a really important role for the society, for a few people who need this kind of support, because it can be quite traumatic, especially, you know, not having the right support. Some families are not very supportive, I’m afraid. So it’s good to have an option there where you can feel supported, you can talk to, you can have some advice. So yeah, it’s really important.

I find it silly that people are trying to say that, ‘Oh, no, there is no conflict between religion and homosexuality’. No, there is. I think up to recently, up to 82% of religious institutions, they consider homosexuality a sin and abomination. It creates a lot of guilt, unhappiness, stress, hence, conversion therapy, which is still happening in the UK, which is another reason I’m supporting humanism. I mean, we should stop that. It’s a very primitive, archaic thing to do.

In 2010, OutRage! joined with the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association, the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement, the National Union of Students’ LGBT+ campaign, and many others, to create the Equal Love Campaign. This had the twin objectives of overturning the ban on same-sex marriage and overturning the ban on opposite sex civil partnerships. We began by organising for same sex couples to file applications for civil marriages in their local register offices. And then followed that up with four heterosexual couples filing applications for civil partnerships in their local register offices. When they were all refused, we then took our case to the European Court of Human Rights, arguing that this was unjustified, illegitimate discrimination, on the one hand against straight couples, because they were not allowed to have a civil partnership, and on the other hand against same-sex couples, because they were barred from civil marriage. Now, the European Court of Human Rights sat on the application for a long time. But we used that time, that period, to lobby the Conservative government and we had to do some sort of political and mental acrobatics. I can remember arguing to the Conservatives: you should support same-sex marriage, because you support marriage. Surely you want more people to get married, if you believe in this institution, and according to your own values, marriage is a Conservative value. So how come you’re not backing same-sex marriage? And then one by one, we got leading Tories, including Boris Johnson, who was then Mayor of London, to back same-sex marriage. In the end, completely against their own rules, the European Court of Human Rights, disallowed our application, and refused to give a reason, even though that’s required, according to the statutes. I don’t know who pulled what strings and why but you know, but it didn’t really matter, because by this time, we’d already got momentum in the Conservative Party. And so then we were able to lobby MPs to vote for equality. And we used opinion polls, which showed that a majority of the public, even a majority of religious people, supported the right of same-sex couples to marry in civil ceremonies, not religious ones, but in civil ceremonies. So clearly, public opinion was on side. We were winning. And that, I think, emboldened a lot of MPs to eventually vote for equal marriage in 2013. So it was a relatively brief campaign from 2010 to 2013. And it got a result.

We were really angered by these intransigent attitudes, particularly because one of OutRage!’s strongest supporters, and a supporter of the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association, Dudley Cave, had served with distinction during the Second World War. He’d been captured by the Japanese at the fall of Singapore, and sent to work on the Thai-Burma railway, the ‘Railway of Death’. He was one of the very few lucky survivors. So working with him, and other LGBT+ veterans, we decided to create Queer Remembrance Day. This was to coincide with Remembrance Sunday and involve the ceremony at the Cenotaph immediately after the main official ceremony. So we would march down Whitehall, from near Trafalgar Square, with gigantic pink banners, pink triangle wreaths. And included among our members were veterans with their medals. Now this is not about glorification of war or endorsing every war that Britain’s ever been involved with. It was about remembering the sacrifice of LGBT+ people, who risked their lives. And then as soon as the war was over, were treated as criminals, and in some cases, imprisoned. Dudley Cave himself, you know, just a few years after the war, he was sacked as a cinema manager because he was gay. When he tried to get the Royal British Legion to acknowledge LGBT+ service personnel, he was fobbed off. ‘This is not an issue we want to discuss. This is disgusting.’ You know, really abusive language by the official leadership of the Royal British Legion.

When we got to the Cenotaph, we held a short ceremony, and then laid out a pink triangle wreath commemorating LGBT+ people, military and civilian, who died fighting fascism. What surprised and pleased us is that there were still lots of crowds around from the main official ceremony. And they applauded us. They applauded us. There were no boos or jeers, there was applause. And people gathered around to listen to what we were saying. That was very, very surprising and comforting.

Did it become, then, part of the official… Were you sanctioned via this intervention?

No. We were never sanctioned. But of course, later on, after many years being banned from marching in the official parade, LGBT contingents have now been permitted to wear uniform and join the official ceremony.

And actually, I have a poem here, which looks at the other side – when you’re stuck in a community, particularly, in this case, a faith community that doesn’t allow dissent. 

So it’s called ‘The Happy Humanist’. She wears her happy humanist badge with evangelical pride. The t-shirt reads ‘Good without God’, in letters bold and wide. She carries over her shoulder a vintage BHA tote, stuffed with postcards, each emblazoned with a Bertrand Russell quote. She never utters ‘bless you’ when ‘gesundheit’ will suffice, and finds the term ‘spiritual wellbeing’ worryingly imprecise. And that is why she’s here today among the anxious crowd of people who left their religions when leaving wasn’t allowed. The apostates huddle meekly over coffee, tea and cake, some staring at the ceiling, some counting breaths as their hands shake. They’re here to tell their stories and to feel they’re not alone, having changed their minds on an issue that has cost them heart and home. Here, at least it’s not a crime, but still there is some danger, stigma, violence, prejudice, from family, friend, and stranger. Everyone deserves the right to have faith and believe, but equally must be allowed to doubt, reject and leave. And so she serves them coffee, reaching out a steady hand to the other happy humans who have come to understand.

I feel very lucky to have met, not just AC Grayling, but so many inspiring humanists, particularly through Humanists UK, who have made me feel like it’s not just the right choice intellectually, as we were talking about before, but actually, it is also the right choice in terms of a group of people who I feel at home with, who I feel form a community that I belong to. And I just hope that over the coming years, we find more ways to do what I think you’re doing really successfully with the LGBT Humanists, which is bringing us together as a social group to form friendships and networks and connections, which will sustain us and support us through our lives, rather than just swapping arguments and debating points.

Nobody in the drama department gave a toss whether I was gay or not. It was all in my head. And I thought, this really is the end between me and my dad, you know, if this is going to be the case, and all of those things were going through my head. And so I thought… and the psychiatrist came to see me. And we were talking about these things. And I said, you know, I was put up for aversion therapy when I was 15. But I didn’t do it. And he went, ‘Ah, well, interestingly enough, we’re working on that right now in the university. In the sociology department’. I think it was, or the psychology department. And so I said, ‘sign me up’. And so I went through this aversion therapy, which was, well, you probably know all about it. 

They put an electrode on your wrist and one on your ankle. First of all, you have to go through and you have to pick out pictures of men you find attractive, and it wasn’t even porn. There were no dicks to see. It was just sort of men in sailor uniforms and maybe one in bathing shorts. But they were all very, very tame. And then I had to go through pictures of women and pick out women I found attractive, which I didn’t find any of them attractive. So that was a bit difficult. I sort of had to vaguely try and work out… And then you sit in this darkened room with these electrodes on. And they show you a picture of a man for five seconds. And if you don’t press a button within five seconds, they give you an electric shock, which is very unpleasant. And then they show you a picture of a woman as a reward. If you press within four seconds, you don’t get the shock. Except that doesn’t work all the time. Sometimes, if you press, even after three seconds, they’ll give you a shock, just to make sure that you associate looking at pictures of men with electric shocks. And then you’ve got to keep filling in all these forms, and ‘how attractive did you find this person…’ And I went through all of this, over months and months, and I emerged at the end, sort of like a neuter. I had no feelings about anything, no sexual feelings towards anybody at all, even towards myself. I had no interest in sex, because I just associated sexual desire with being shocked, with electric shocks. And if the only sexual desire I could get, that I felt, was the wrong sort, then psychologically, I couldn’t feel anything. So that’s what happened really.

Oh, it was in the Century Club in central London, Shaftesbury Avenue or somewhere like that, which has a lovely roof terrace as well. And it’s lovely. There was, it was small groom and a tall groom, and the tall groom blubbed quite a lot all the way through the ceremony, which was very sweet. And I remember he’d written about five pages of vows that he wanted to say. And the little one had written about half a page. And I had to say to both of them, ‘could you make that one a bit shorter’ and ‘could you make that one a bit longer’, without giving anything away. And it was lovely. And I stayed and had a quick drink with them all afterwards, and then off I left.

But let me take you back 30 years. I wasn’t then a minister, I was a member of a church in London. And through various circumstances, I went to my minister, and I said, ‘I think I’m gay, but I don’t want to be’. And, I volunteered that information because I was struggling with what it meant for me to be gay. And I was married and had a family. And it was all very complicated, and I was conflicted and struggling. But at that time, the minister led me through what I didn’t label at the time, but I’ve come to understand, was clearly conversion therapy, where, basically, we would pray together once a week and study a book together, in order, and this is the key thing about conversion therapy and the legal ban that we are campaigning for, as LGBT Humanists, the minister, very clearly had a predetermined purpose, to get rid of my homosexuality, and to make me straight, and I was a willing volunteer in that. And that’s one of the landmarks that we have, the red lines in the campaign as LGBT Humanists, even if someone is willing and consenting to conversion therapy, if it has that predetermined purpose, to change somebody, to eradicate their homosexuality, then it is abuse. And that should be the legal understanding, and a legal ban on it. But hey, I’m talking about 30 years ago, clearly, we’re still waiting for that ban to come in. It was in the church context. And I think… two things I would say about that for me: one, it didn’t work. Because you can’t really change someone’s sexual orientation. And certainly that, you know, I am gay. And finally, you know, I was able finally to come out many years later. But the second thing it did, was it buried the feelings I was having, and the journey I was on. And it deepened the guilt, and the sense of shame I had, because clearly, it didn’t work, so I was again, imagining or exploring what it was to be gay. And every time I went there, in my mind or in exploration, I just felt even worse about it because I thought I’d been cured. I’d been through the prayer therapy, we’d been through 10 months of weekly meetings to pray it out of me. And I thought, ‘Okay, this is great. I can just carry on with my straight life’. But clearly, that didn’t happen. And it just deepened that sense of shame and self-hatred, which is not a good place to be. 

That experience of love and affirmation in the Pride march in London and here in Oxford. I think if we can have a reasonable, calm, evidence-based conversation about what it means, both to be gay, or lesbian, or bisexual, and including transgender, then we can win hearts and minds, have an evidence-based conversation about what it means to be human and autonomous, and that we can determine who we are. We don’t need history, the patriarchal, colonial history, all that overarching, sort of, domination, to tell us who we are. We have it within ourselves, as individual people to discover and assert who we are. I think that’s a great discovery and affirmation of humanism, that we are human-centric. 

And for me, this ties into what I was saying earlier about my own journey. That was a fantastic discovery. I remember saying to my counsellor at the time, I felt terribly trapped in the construction, to use that word, that construction of the life that had been partly put together by myself, but that I was bound in the bonds of that very trapped life. And my counsellor helped me very positively to explore what I could do, how I could release myself. And for me, that was a revelation, that I might have felt trapped, but I was an autonomous human being, and I could do things. I could make changes. I could make choices that would affect other people, yes, but would have a good outcome for me, in terms of my mental health, and my wellbeing, and my identity. So for me, my coming out journey was as much a journey to humanism as a journey out of religion, and into being gay and free and out. And I know there’s lots of diversity, lots of gay people share faith and religion, and that’s lovely, and that’s part of the joy of the complexity and the diversity of what it means to be human. No one size fits all.

… means I’m gay, basically, I’m in love with a boy. But I’d had sex with loads of other men, so I knew all about the fact that I was gay. I didn’t realise… just… I didn’t know it was a disease. Put it that way. I thought it was just me. But anyway, they’d convinced me. So for six weeks, I got treated like shit. And at a certain point, the headmaster called me in again. And he said, these are his exact words, you won’t believe this but this is what he said. ‘Right, Gavins, you’re a homosexual, homosexuality is a disease. It’s a vile disease. We don’t have homosexuals in this school. So we’re going to expel you.’ And this was three weeks before sitting my fucking A-levels. Anyway. So he said, we’re going to expel you. And I thought, ‘shit’, as you do. And then he said, ‘unless you go to be cured. We can cure you of your disease. If you agree to go for the cure, we won’t expel you. You’ll be able to sit your A-levels and go off to university’ or whatever. Well, what choice is that? Of course I’m gonna volunteer. I didn’t know what the fuck I was volunteering for. So I volunteered. And the Monsignor said, ‘well, we can’t cure you. You have to go and tell your GP that you are homosexual. You’ve got a disease and you want curing.’

I can analyse this now, from fifty years on. I’ve written about it in my book. They must’ve been fucking stupid these people. I’m gonna tell you fifty years on what my mind took into this. If I see a picture of a man, I’m getting an electric shock, oh fuck. When I see a picture of a woman, I’m not getting an electric shock, but soon I fucking well will be. So, I see a picture of a man, I’m in pain. I see a picture of a woman, I know I’m gonna be in pain. I don’t fucking figure that out. If they’d have given me a pint of beer and a piece of bloody cake and turned the fucking machine off and said ‘fuck off home, there’s a woman for you’, after one electric shock, it may have worked. But for six fucking months of it, it didn’t. But anyway. So, there you go.

This thing went on for about an hour and a half. Well, I didn’t know how long it went on for until I looked at my watch and found out that it had gone on for about an hour and a half. At the end of the session, the doctor just said… He undid me, covered me up again, that was nice wasn’t it, just put the dressing gown back. Sometimes I took the… in later days, I took the dressing gown off completely. But there you go. Just depends which doctor it was, I think. And then the doctor said, ‘We’ll see you next time you come’. So, I go back to the dressing room, I go back to get my clothes and my wotsits. You know, it was, an hour and a half had passed. And I thought ‘fuck’, and I didn’t know what I was thinking, actually, I was in a fucking shit place, but I couldn’t think long because in an hour’s time, I’d be sat in the afternoon session at school doing my first of my two maths A Level exams.

So I rushed back to school. Didn’t know what I was thinking. Went to the exam room. Sat in it for about half an hour. Didn’t write a fucking thing. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t – my right fucking arm’s my writing arm, my right arm’s in fucking agony. I couldn’t stop my hands shaking. And I got up, and one of the teachers said, ‘You’ve got to stay for at least half an hour’. So I just watched the clock until it got to half an hour, fucked off and went to the pub and got absolutely paralytic blind drunk. So there you go. I failed – you won’t believe this, but I failed my A Levels. Well, I passed one, I got an O Level in chemistry, which meant in the first chemistry exam, I must’ve got forty percent, because that was the pass mark for O Levels. And I failed everything else. And I had two more electric shock sessions on the same day as I took my A levels. How the fuck was I supposed to pass anything? Well, I wasn’t. And again, I can analyse this looking back from fifty years on, I wasn’t meant to fucking pass. They couldn’t have me passing my A Levels, because if I’d have passed my A Levels, I would have fucked off. And it was decided by everybody – teachers, everybody. When I got the A Level results in August, like you do, I thought the shit had hit the fan. The shit didn’t hit the fan. But they decided that I must continue at school to do the next year. And because I’m continuing at school, the electric shocks can continue, which they did.

So, yeah, I was about 18 years old. Moved in with Christian family, ended up going to the church, which was a church in Newport called King’s Church, which was very kind of evangelical, Pentecostal, born again, and it was very radical, and I say radical in inverted commas, but it was very, very Bible believing environment. And that’s where I kind of first experienced, what you could say is, I guess, abuse really, when it comes to casting out demons, gay demons, out of you, and humiliating yourself by having to talk about what sexually you want or feel, and then being prayed over. And then, I have a friend now who remembers that time. She remembers being in the room where there’s, like, I don’t know, ten or so people just praying over you to get the demon of homosexuality out of you or whatever, whatever it particularly was, which is traumatising stuff. So I experienced that there. Yeah, which was a lot of crying, a lot of gut wrenching pain, really. I mean, here I was really… it’s the kind of, all those years of the bullying, being beaten up by your own family to toughen you up, having the shit kicked out of you by groups of people. So here were a group of people trying to get rid of that ‘thing’ that meant that I’d been beat up, if that makes sense. And I think I was so vulnerable at that point that I thought anything that was going to get me out of being this awful homosexual was better than, you know, living with it. So I believed that it was possible, because people around me believed it was possible to not be gay. Yeah, I just went with it. And interestingly, I went through lots of different, what you could call conversion therapy ideas, really, in a series of churches after that.

So I eventually left that church. I went to another church where I had therapy. I remember having to drive from Newport to Cardiff. Oh, sorry. I remember having to drive from Newport to Carmarthen to have therapy with somebody who was apparently some Christian therapist. I don’t fully remember what happened during that point, but I know it was people genuinely wanting to see you change, as well. And I remember, I do remember, another therapy session with somebody who took a long time to kind of ask the question. And it was, it went something like this, ‘So, do you like… I don’t know how to say this. Do you like… wearing women’s knickers?’ And I found that quite hilarious, really, because… so that was therapy. That was one session of therapy. I have no issue with women’s knickers, but I didn’t wear them.

I left a group session in Bristol, middle of Summer, ended up going somewhere. I’d realised it was a cruising area but didn’t know what went on there, and ended up coming out, in a way, and had my first taste of what it meant to be with another man, in a cruising area. And that was like, following a conversion… following a… it’s embarassing to talk about but I’ll talk about it, it’s fine. 

I remember my, the strange experience of, kind of, my last ever group conversion meeting was like leaving Bristol on a summer day and driving back to Newport, and then ending up in a cruising area. I’d never had any experience physically with a man before, ‘til I was like 29, 30, and this was the point that it happened, and it was actually after a conversion therapy meeting. My first ever experience with a man. And weirdly, I wasn’t stuck by lightning and I didn’t… life wasn’t that miserable. So, I was genuinely, I was genuinely shocked that the world didn’t collapse around me because I’ve had an experience with somebody sexually, another man sexually. But it took ‘till the age of 29, 30 to do that.